Revisiting Trauma: Wounds Seen and Unseen in Canadian and Indian Prison Narratives

Trauma Studies and Prison Narratives have emerged over the past few decades as the most significant fields in the humanities. There has been a significant discussion regarding the psychological effects of incarceration; however, literature examining prison as a site of trauma is unusual. Focusing on Iftikhar Gilani's My Days in Prison (2005) and Yvonne Johnson and Rudy Wiebe's Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman (1998), the article analyzes how prison narratives represent prison as a violent space that inflicts trauma in its characters. These prison narratives represent Yvonne Johnson, the prisoner in Stolen Life, and Gilani as victims of acute psychological trauma faced due to the sheer viciousness of the prison system. The article also concentrates on how the prison experience is both similar and different in Canada and India.

Revisionary Narratives

Revisionary Narratives examines the historical and formal evolutions of Moroccan women’s auto/biography in the last four decades, particularly its conflation with testimony and its expansion beyond literary texts. It analyzes auto/biographical and testimonial acts in Arabic, colloquial Moroccan Darija, French, and English in the fields of prison narratives, visual arts, theater performance, and digital media, situating them within specific sociopolitical and cultural contexts of production and consumption. Part One begins by tracing the rise of a feminist consciousness in prison narratives produced and/or published in the late 1970s through the 2000s. Part Two moves to analyzing the ubiquity of auto/biography and testimony in the arts as well as contemporary sociopolitical activism. The focus throughout the various case studies is women’s engagement with patriarchal and (neo)imperial norms and practices as they relate to their experiences of political violence, activism, migration, and displacement. To understand why and how women collapse the boundaries between autobiography, biography, testimony, and sociopolitical commentary, the book employs a broad, transdisciplinary, montage approach that combines theories on gender and autobiography and takes into account postcolonial, postmodern, transnational, transglobal and translocal perspectives.